Is your business ready for the e-commerce revolution?

The early days….

In July 1995, Jeff Bezos boxed up the first book ever sold on Amazon.com from his Seattle garage. Within its first 30 days of business, Amazon sold books to online shoppers in all 50 U.S stats and 45 countries.

E-commerce as we know it today started….

Amazon has revolutionised the book buying experience: users could search available titles by keyword, author and subject. However, the most popular feature has always been the reader review. Any amazon user can write a book review making it easy for buyers to make up their minds.

Today, e-commerce is a multi-billion dollar industry that changed how we shop…

Making a revenue of $100 billion annually and growing rapidly in the US, E-commerce has disrupted brick and mortar stores and led many of them to bankruptcy. The main reason was that they did not react early enough to this trend that shifts consumers demand from offline to online.

GCC is the biggest and fastest growing market for E-commerce…

In Saudi Arabia alone, the numbers are mind-blowing:

Revenue in the e-Commerce market amounts to US$5,471m in 2017.

Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2017-2021) of 12.1 % resulting in a market volume of US$8,642m in 2021.

The market’s largest segment is the segment Fashion with a market volume of US$1,679m in 2017.

User penetration is at 50.4 % in 2017 and is expected to hit 70.7 % in 2021.

The average revenue per user (ARPU) currently amounts to US$471.55.

E-commerce is very popular among consumers because they get lower prices and better availability of products, they can order at their convenience and read product reviews.

Mobile shopping is now a big deal. 80% of users access their favorite online stores via their smartphones. .”At dubizzle , if we hadn’t adjusted to this new reality, we may not exist today. 3-4 years ago we were debating mobile, but today, 75% of our traffic is on mobile phones”, says Zak Nasser product manager at dubizzle.

E-commerce represents a great opportunity- rather than a threat- for businesses in the GCC. They must unlock its potential and use if to x10 their revenue or grow multi-million dollar business exactly how companies like Zalando and NastyGal have created online empires.